New ways to engage customers in co-designing your company's future - a weblog to complement the book, Outside Innovation, by Patty Seybold

Description

What is Outside Innovation?

It’s when customers lead the design of your business processes, products, services, and business models. It’s when customers roll up their sleeves to co-design their products and your business. It’s when customers attract other customers to build a vital customer-centric ecosystem around your products and services.
The good news is that customer-led innovation is one of the most predictably successful innovation processes.
The bad news is that many managers and executives don’t yet believe in it. Today, that’s their loss. Ultimately, it may be their downfall.

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Observations

LEAD USERS

Eric von Hippel coined the term "lead users" to describe a group of both customers and non-customers who are passionate about getting certain things accomplished. They may not know or care about the products or services you offer. But they do care about their project or need. Lead users have already explored innovative ways to get things done. They're usually willing to share their approaches with others.

LEAD CUSTOMERS

I use the term "lead customers" to describe the small percentage of your current customers who are truly innovative. These may not be your most vocal customers, your most profitable customers, or your largest customers. But they are the customers who care deeply about the way in which your products or services could help them achieve something they care about.

LEAD CUSTOMERS AND LEAD USERS

We’ve spent the last 25 years identifying, interviewing, selecting, and grouping customers together to participate in our Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions. Over the years, we’ve learned how to identify the people who will contribute the most to a customer co-design session. These are the same kinds of people you should be recruiting when you set out to harness customer-led innovation.

HOW DO YOU WIN IN INNOVATION?

You no longer win by having the smartest engineers and scientists; you win by having the smartest customers!

CUSTOMER CO-DESIGN

In more than 25 years of business strategy consulting, we’ve found that customer co-design is a woefully under-used capability.

Customer-Led Business Strategy

July 24, 2014

As I mentioned last week, in my post, “Enterprise Customers Forged the Apple/IBM Ecosystem,” what tickled me about the exclusive worldwide partnership announced by IBM and Apple on 7/15/14 was that it was a great example of IBM’s running around in front of the customer parade. Enterprise customers—led by their CEOs, sales execs, and top-earning rainmakers—had already voted with their proverbial feet and adopted Apple iPads and iPhones as their devices of choice for getting work done on the go. That meant that their IT organizations had to adapt by accommodating Apple devices and apps, and they did. Soon, an entire ecosystem of third-party tools and services sprang up to help enterprise IT professionals manage iDevices, support them, develop apps for them, and deliver back-end enterprise data and applications securely to employees. Apple helped primarily by getting out of the way. That evolution began four years ago, shortly after the introduction of the iPad. Apple supported these activities with its iOS Developer Enterprise Program, which allowed corporations to develop apps for their own institutional use and not have to publish them in the Apple App Store.

Now, IBM has made a dramatic entrance into this ecosystem—with four offerings specifically targeted for their many enterprise accounts: IBM MobileFirst for iOS, IBM MobileFirst Platforms for iOS, AppleCare for Enterprise, and MobileFirst supply and management. The first two offerings are targeted for application developers and are iOS-specific instantiations of IBM’s MobileFirst offerings, which we described in IBM’s MobileFirst “Customer Cloud” Strategy, in late March. Essentially, this is a cloud-based development platform that is designed to help enterprise app developers develop, deploy, secure, and integrate corporate apps into their (IBM and other ERP) back-end systems and services. IBM has developed 100+ starter kit apps for over 10 vertical industries.

July 11, 2014

My favorite business model—and the one I believe is gradually becoming more pervasive—is a customer ecosystem. It’s a business network of suppliers, partners, regulators, who are all aligned to help customers meet their outcomes in the easiest, most cost effective manner. It’s not top down. It’s not bottom up. It’s inside out or outside in. It starts with the customers, with what they care about, with what they want to get done, at the core. All of the players in the ecosystem align to help those customers reach their desired outcomes with the most grace and ease.

Our healthcare industry is a far cry from being a true customer ecosystem. Today, particularly in the U.S., healthcare is a field of land mines that patients and their families have to detect, dodge, and jump over in order to get and stay healthy.

Yet, all over the country, and around the world, patients and their families are taking more control over their own health. They are demanding to see their medical records and to keep them accurate. They are doing their own research online about conditions and treatments. And, most of all, they are banding together in online communities to support each another, and to share their experiences and their learnings with one another, in order to help the next patient/family with a particular condition have a better outcome and experience.

May 24, 2014

We’ve had a lot of demand for Customer Journey Mapping recently. Perhaps it’s the customer experience flavor du jour. But we’re happy that so many companies are paying renewed attention to the quality of the end-to-end customer experience they deliver.

We’ve been mapping customer experiences for over 25 years with clients in many different industries—way before the term Customer Journey Mapping was invented. What’s good about a single Customer Journey Map is that it represents the end-to-end experience you want to provide from the first moment a customer engages with your brand until their last breath (or until they no longer need you). What’s challenging about creating a single end-to-end Customer Journey is that every organization has a lot of different types of customers in different contexts at different stages. And different customers in different contexts need and care about different things. In this first article about our approach to Customer Journey Mapping, we explain how you can capture the requirements of your key target customer segments using Customer Scenario Maps and then combine the key patterns from those scenarios to create an end-to-end Customer Journey Map that accurately reflects all of their needs.

April 11, 2014

For those of you in the Boston/New England area, you have an opportunity to experience firsthand what a FIRST challenge looks like and to experience its gracious professionalism first-hand.

The 2014 New England FIRST Robotics Competition Region Championship (Qualifying Championship) Boston is this weekend...April 11/12 – The opening ceremony is TODAY, Friday, April 11th, starting at 8:30 a.m. at the Boston University Agganis Arena. The final matches and the closing ceremony takes place tomorrow, Saturday, April 12th.

April 04, 2014

What if you had a Customer Advisory Board meeting in which PowerPoint presentations were banned? What if your executives and product managers spent most of the first day listening deeply to their customers talk among themselves about how they do their jobs and comparing notes about the strategic issues they’re grappling with in their respective industries?

What if, instead of sitting through your product managers’ roadmap presentations and being expected to react to them, your customers presented their roadmaps and asked their colleagues for advice? What if those customers—incredibly busy high-level decision-makers and strategic thinkers—began looking forward to your semi-annual CAB meetings as a valuable opportunity to lift themselves up out of day-to-day operations and to think strategically about their own business by learning about their peers’ strategies and challenges.

Years ago, Skip Walter, who was then a distinguished fellow at Digital Equipment Corporation, taught me the power of “second attention.” When you’re focusing on someone else’s problems, your mind is free to make new connections that will result in amazing insights about your own thorny issues, he explained. I’ve taken that advice to heart and used it many times to empower a group of smart people in a room to do (at least) two things simultaneously: 1) Listen deeply to someone else’s challenge and give them advice, 2) Mull over your own situation in the background and gain new perspectives and insight. That, in my opinion, should be the MAIN focus of any Customer Advisory Board session.

Here is Ronni Marshak’s “How To” about how to get your next CAB off on the right foot.

March 21, 2014

Many of the articles we write and many of the consulting, training, and mentoring projects we do involve improving customer experience and/or designing new and/or improved products, services, and business models. Like all consultants, we have a set of methods and tools we use. We call ours Customer Co-Design, and it includes a method for facilitating workshops including customers and cross-functional stakeholders who co-design new experiences and/or products and services together. We call this workshop Customer Scenario® Mapping. We use it within organizations to help internal employees build consensus about the ideal customer experience they want to deliver. When used in this way—Customer Scenario Mapping is most similar to the technique of Customer Journey Mapping. We also use this method to facilitate co-design workshops with end-customers (business and/or consumers), partners, internal stakeholders, and external stakeholders. What’s fun and useful about this approach is that it’s “customers all the way down” – you start with the customers designing their ideal way to “do their jobs” and then all the supporting layers and business processes neatly align around the customers’ key moments of truth and success metrics.

This week, Ronni Marshak shares the stories of how our Customer Scenario Mapping technique has been co-designed with our clients and their customers for almost three decades now.

March 14, 2014

Edward Snowden has mobilized the Tech and UX communities to improve and to rescue the Internet. This is a watershed event. It’s an irresistible and catalyzing challenge that I believe WILL produce results. This week, Snowden threw down a gauntlet: Save the Internet by designing easy-to-use end-to-end encryption.

I believe this challenge will not go unheeded. I expect thousands of motivated user experience professionals and cryptographers to partner in creating the next generation of communications tools for the Internet and for mobile devices. These tools will not only be more secure; they will also be easy to use. Today, if you want to keep from being surveilled, you have to become a techno-weenie. That’s not right, according to Snowden. We should all have the right to be protected against unlawful seizure and search.

Edward Snowden is, of course, the most famous whistle blower in history. He leaked documents from the NSA to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, documents which have proved that the U.S. “domestic” security agency has been collecting, seizing, storing, and analyzing all the email and phone traffic that takes place on the Internet. Snowden spoke at an ACLU-sponsored event at the South by Southwest SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas on March 10th via Google+ video link through seven Internet proxies. You can watch the conversation between Ben Wizner and Chris Soghoian of the ACLU and Ed Snowden here:

February 28, 2014

“Why do companies invest in business process design if they don’t focus first on the processes that impact customer experience?,” Andrew Spanyi asked when we met by phone. Andrew Spanyi is a business process design, operational leadership, and performance management consultant. He has been helping large and mid-size organizations overhaul their business processes and re-align their strategies for most of his career. “I won’t work with companies that don’t start from the outside in, from the customer’s point of view,” he told me. That was music to my ears. We proceeded to have a lively discussion swapping war stories about all the clients we’d each worked with who professed to being “customer-focused,” but whose key performance metrics were bottom-line focused, not customer-experience driven. Somehow, the leadership teams in these firms missed the point that if you don’t attend to customer experience first, you won’t have any customers to bring in revenues, and your costs-to-serve will skyrocket because your business processes are optimized to make money, not to make it easy for customers to get things done.

Andrew firmly believes that, if you first identify the customer-critical vital signs for your organization, only then are you in the position to begin to streamline your business processes. You want to optimize those business processes to deliver great consistent, operational performance, but do it by focusing from the outside in, not from the inside out.

In 2014: Deliver Breakthrough Customer-Centric Results

What if you could deliver fantastic results in 2014: exciting new products, great customer uptake, leave your competitors in the dust, and deliver incredible value to your end-customers which will translate into broader reach, faster adoption, higher revenues, and lower costs? You can. It’s simple to do. Select the right target customers and get them engaged all the way through your planning, development, piloting, launch, and rapid iteration of any customer-impacting projects. You’ll inject customer-centricity into all of those steps in any project by engaging customers (or target end-users) to help. You’ll have guaranteed early adopters, and they’ll help you cross the proverbial chasm by ensuring that you’ve considered and dealt with all the potential roadblocks to adoption.